# VoroNav: Voronoi-based Zero-shot Object Navigation with Large Language Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.02695 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02695/

## Key facts

- Cited by 57 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [A Comprehensive Overview of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06435/) (2023)
- [Habitat-Matterport 3D Dataset (HM3D): 1000 Large-scale 3D Environments for Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08238/) (2021)
- [On Evaluation of Embodied Navigation Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06757/) (2018)
- [Beyond the Nav-Graph: Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02857/) (2020)
- [Object Goal Navigation using Goal-Oriented Semantic Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00643/) (2020)
- [CoWs on Pasture: Baselines and Benchmarks for Language-Driven Zero-Shot Object Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10421/) (2022)
- [Simple but Effective: CLIP Embeddings for Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09888/) (2021)
- [ZSON: Zero-Shot Object-Goal Navigation using Multimodal Goal Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.12403/) (2022)
- [ETPNav: Evolving Topological Planning for Vision-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03047/) (2023)
- [Habitat Synthetic Scenes Dataset (HSSD-200): An Analysis of 3D Scene Scale and Realism Tradeoffs for ObjectGoal Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11290/) (2023)
- [PONI: Potential Functions for ObjectGoal Navigation with Interaction-free Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.10029/) (2022)
- [Waypoint Models for Instruction-guided Navigation in Continuous Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02207/) (2021)
- [ESC: Exploration with Soft Commonsense Constraints for Zero-shot Object Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13166/) (2023)
- [L3MVN: Leveraging Large Language Models for Visual Target Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05501/) (2023)
- [Navigating to Objects in the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00922/) (2022)
- [Navigation with Large Language Models: Semantic Guesswork as a Heuristic for Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10103/) (2023)
- [Bridging Zero-shot Object Navigation and Foundation Models through Pixel-Guided Navigation Skill](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10309/) (2023)
- [Robot Learning in Homes: Improving Generalization and Reducing Dataset Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.07049/) (2018)
- [Zero Experience Required: Plug & Play Modular Transfer Learning for Semantic Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.02440/) (2022)
- [How To Not Train Your Dragon: Training-free Embodied Object Goal Navigation with Semantic Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16925/) (2023)
- [Renderable Neural Radiance Map for Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00304/) (2023)
- [Zero-shot object goal visual navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07423/) (2022)
- [Zero-shot Active Visual Search (ZAVIS): Intelligent Object Search for Robotic Assistants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08803/) (2022)
- [Zero-Shot Object Searching Using Large-scale Object Relationship Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06228/) (2023)
- [ReVoLT: Relational Reasoning and Voronoi Local Graph Planning for Target-driven Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02382/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 57)

- [Hierarchical Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Graphs for Language-Grounded Robot Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17846/) (2024)
- [InstructNav: Zero-shot System for Generic Instruction Navigation in Unexplored Environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04882/) (2024)
- [StreamVLN: Streaming Vision-and-Language Navigation via SlowFast Context Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05240/) (2025)
- [UniGoal: Towards Universal Zero-shot Goal-oriented Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10630/) (2025)
- [WMNav: Integrating Vision-Language Models into World Models for Object Goal Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02247/) (2025)
- [CogNav: Cognitive Process Modeling for Object Goal Navigation with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10439/) (2024)
- [Mem2Ego: Empowering Vision-Language Models with Global-to-Ego Memory for Long-Horizon Embodied Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14254/) (2025)
- [EMOS: Embodiment-aware Heterogeneous Multi-robot Operating System with LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.22662/) (2024)
- [Building a Mind Palace: Structuring Environment-Grounded Semantic Graphs for Effective Long Video Analysis with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04336/) (2025)
- [Grounded Vision-Language Navigation for UAVs with Open-Vocabulary Goal Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10756/) (2025)
- [TopV-Nav: Unlocking the Top-View Spatial Reasoning Potential of MLLM for Zero-shot Object Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16425/) (2024)
- [DAG-Plan: Generating Directed Acyclic Dependency Graphs for Dual-Arm Cooperative Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09953/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Multi-Robot Semantic Navigation Through Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Score Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18292/) (2024)
- [NavigateDiff: Visual Predictors are Zero-Shot Navigation Assistants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13894/) (2025)
- [GC-VLN: Instruction as Graph Constraints for Training-free Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.10454/) (2025)
- [Nav-R2 Dual-Relation Reasoning for Generalizable Open-Vocabulary Object-Goal Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02400/) (2025)
- [TDANet: Target-Directed Attention Network For Object-Goal Visual Navigation With Zero-Shot Ability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08353/) (2024)
- [CAMON: Cooperative Agents for Multi-Object Navigation with LLM-based Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00632/) (2024)
- [DORAEMON: Decentralized Ontology-aware Reliable Agent with Enhanced Memory Oriented Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21969/) (2025)
- [VISTAv2: World Imagination for Indoor Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00041/) (2025)
- [STRIVE: Structured Representation Integrating VLM Reasoning for Efficient Object Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.06729/) (2025)
- [EfficientNav: Towards On-Device Object-Goal Navigation with Navigation Map Caching and Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18546/) (2025)
- [APEX: A Decoupled Memory-based Explorer for Asynchronous Aerial Object Goal Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00551/) (2026)
- [LongNav-R1: Horizon-Adaptive Multi-Turn RL for Long-Horizon VLA Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.12351/) (2026)
- [DOZE: A Dataset for Open-Vocabulary Zero-Shot Object Navigation in Dynamic Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19007/) (2024)
- [Find Everything: A General Vision Language Model Approach to Multi-Object Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00388/) (2024)
- [OmniEVA: Embodied Versatile Planner via Task-Adaptive 3D-Grounded and Embodiment-aware Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09332/) (2025)
- [Human-like Navigation in a World Built for Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21189/) (2025)
- [FineCog-Nav: Integrating Fine-grained Cognitive Modules for Zero-shot Multimodal UAV Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.16298/) (2026)
- [ESARBench: A Benchmark for Agentic UAV Embodied Search and Rescue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.01371/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In the realm of household robotics, the Zero-Shot Object Navigation (ZSON) task empowers agents to adeptly traverse unfamiliar environments and locate objects from novel categories without prior explicit training. This paper introduces VoroNav, a novel semantic exploration framework that proposes the Reduced Voronoi Graph to extract exploratory paths and planning nodes from a semantic map constructed in real time. By harnessing topological and semantic information, VoroNav designs text-based descriptions of paths and images that are readily interpretable by a large language model (LLM). In particular, our approach presents a synergy of path and farsight descriptions to represent the environmental context, enabling LLM to apply commonsense reasoning to ascertain waypoints for navigation. Extensive evaluation on HM3D and HSSD validates VoroNav surpasses existing benchmarks in both success rate and exploration efficiency (absolute improvement: +2.8% Success and +3.7% SPL on HM3D, +2.6% Success and +3.8% SPL on HSSD). Additionally introduced metrics that evaluate obstacle avoidance proficiency and perceptual efficiency further corroborate the enhancements achieved by our method in ZSON planning. Project page: https://voro-nav.github.io